


the sum of all our actions

by magisterequitum



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 07:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magisterequitum/pseuds/magisterequitum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Feet off the porch, Caroline's muffled cries at his back, he leaves. He forces himself to move fast because if he stops, if he scents the air and smells the salt, or if he stays and listens, or if he dares to turn around, he won't go. False optimism still clings to him, saying this is wrong and this isn't right. He wants to go back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sum of all our actions

He flees. 

Feet off the porch, Caroline's muffled cries at his back, he leaves. He forces himself to move fast because if he stops, if he scents the air and smells the salt, or if he stays and listens, or if he dares to turn around, he won't go. False optimism still clings to him, saying this is wrong and this isn't right. He wants to go back. 

He runs to his house instead. 

Empty and dark, he scratches a quick note and leaves it where he knows someone will find it. Puts the deed next to it. 

False optimism dies as he passes the cheerful 'You are now leaving' sign. 

Tyler leaves Mystic Falls in under thirty minutes. 

 

 

 

He doesn't stop till he's in Kentucky. 

His shirt's starting to smell and he's been cramped in a bus for too long; he paid for the ticket with cash. He pays for a motel room in cash too. 

The lukewarm water washes over his back, and he hangs his head, mouth open, inhaling and nearly choking as the water pours in. 

He punches a dent into the wet slick tiles. 

When the skin on his knuckles knits itself back together he does it again, takes another swing, relishing in the sharp bursts of pain, just like he's thirteen and throwing punches all over again. 

The skin still closes back over with nothing to show for it. 

 

 

 

Go West and the air gets dryer and hotter. Nothing like humidity in Mystic Falls, the kind that made them all spend lazy afternoons at the water quarry, sweat gleaming off the girls and their bare legs under their shirts. He thinks of Caroline with her curls pulled onto the top of her head, except for that one that always came loose and stuck to her neck. 

Tyler doesn't really have a method. 

He ran away once, but then he'd not really been alone. Not for long anyway. There's no textbook for running away from the psychotic abuser that wants to kill you for trying to do the right thing and daring not to do as he says; a mouthful he repeats to himself on the sticky hot bus seat. 

He's utterly alone now. An orphan with a wad of cash in his back pocket and a half-eaten burger in his lap and a phone that won't stop buzzing against his thigh. 

He wonders if maybe this is how Jeremy and Elena had felt in the church at their parent's funeral; or their aunt's; or Alaric's; or any of them till they were just like him now. But then he thinks not, because they'd never be alone in the way he was now. 

His phone won't stop buzzing. 

 

 

 

(It's not that he doesn't look at his phone. 

He does. 

He really does. 

Caroline's name flashes over the screen and he has to squeeze his eyes shut, thankful the bus isn't at a rest stop because then he might just buy a ticket for the return route. 

In Lancaster, Ohio, he presses himself into a bathroom stall and listens to her voice. Message one the hitch of her breath and her brave voice, telling him what's going on, and then he jerks the phone away from his ear. In jerky movements, he rips the phone apart and drops it into the trash. 

He just can't.)

 

 

 

Tyler gets another motel room in Indiana. He's looked over his shoulder every step of the way, but there's never been anyone he can see behind him. It's still the feeling though, and that makes him even more furious; an inkling starts to tickle at his brain. The air's cooler than it'd been in Kentucky and he's thankful for the respite. 

He's listless and dares to find a little cafe with computers that have internet access. The girl he pays his time for has blonde hair and chipped pink painted fingernails. She smiles wide at him, chewing at her bottom lip. He looks down at her chipped nails and remembers Caroline asking him once which shade of pink was better for her toes. This girl's much shorter, and her eyes are brown. 

He doesn't look at her when he sits down. 

The Mystic Falls' Gazette takes too long to load, picture by picture, pixel by pixel, too slow. 

When it does he wishes he'd kept his phone. 

Maybe hearing about Jeremy being dead would have been better than reading his obituary instead. 

 

 

 

There's a bar across the street from the motel. 

He knocks back shot after shot, burning whiskey that tears at his throat and makes his fingers shake; or maybe his fingers shake all on their own, maybe they did ever since he stood up from that cafe and the computer and that obituary, maybe they did since he reached for his cellphone only to remember he didn't have it, maybe they did since he remembered how many people are dead now, maybe they did since he walked in the bar's door. 

Whiskey's not enough. 

He stumbles off the barstool and leaves a napkin covered in black ink doodles next to an empty glass. 

 

 

 

He starts writing letters to Caroline. 

He doesn't call her, can't dare to do that, but he wants to talk to her. 

So he writes instead. Scratches and snippets of thoughts and memories on napkins and motel stationary and scrap paper from tables and bus mates. Loopy swirls and chicken scritch that morphs together. 

_i miss you_

_you made me better_

_i'm so sorry i left you that first time. i wish i hadn't. i wish you'd come. i wish you were here. i wish we'd left town._

More honest things he'd never dare tell anyone else. Intimate details that only belonged to him, to them, things beyond an eighteen year old, things that were his and things he knew. Just as he knew the snap of his bones as he shifted and how his blood ran hot forever now. Things he'd only think about when touching the soft curve of her waist or the bend of her knee. Things he'd spell out as he dipped his tongue along her hip bones. Things he'd whisper into her hairline while she slept beside him. 

He writes when he doesn't sleep, because to close his eyes is an impossible thing when there's shadows at his back and no one next to him. 

 

 

 

California's water glimmers different than Florida's water had. Different too from the lakes and streams he'd dipped his hands in on the Appalachian Trail. 

Tyler stands on the boardwalk, hands shoved in his hoodie's pockets, fingertips messy and stained with ink from drawings and notes. A bird swoops lazily for its dinner. 

He's gone East to West, with some variations of North and South in-between. Wobbly and crooked. Taken the bus route from different hubs, but all ended here. 

His fingers itch to check his back pocket for something won't be there. 

 

 

 

(One time Sheriff Forbes had left an atlas out on the dining room table. 

Caroline had made him point to places on the map he'd wanted to see. She'd made him tell her about Florida, about the pines of North Carolina, wrinkling her tiny nose when he'd told her about the heat and people. 

"You really wanna go there?" He'd asked her, grinning. 

She'd shrugged her shoulders. He remembers it because she'd been wearing his shirt, the neck of it slipping off her shoulder, her lips swollen from kissing him upstairs. "Maybe. Like for a trip or vacation." 

Tyler had scrunched his face at that, confused. 

"I like it here," she'd told him.)

 

 

 

There's no one behind him, no eyes on him, no one at all. He's beginning to expect there never were at all. He grinds his teeth at that and feels a fool, or maybe someone else is a fool and he won't live this way forever. 

His entire life has been made up lately of being told he can't have, that he'll have to wait, that he doesn't get what he wants, what he deserves. Until they find a way, that's what they said. He still tastes the salt of her tears, can still hear her cries. 

Tyler buys a ticket back East. Direct route. Straight shot. 

His pocket's empty. 

He'll make a way.


End file.
